by Les Foran
1/200 Charles W. Morgan (Academy)
This little ship is the first rigged sailing ship I have built in about 25 years. It was built in my hotel room while on my current job assignment in Grand Island, NE.
The model is basically built OOB (no access to my goodie stash at home). with extra rigging.
The prototype of this kit is afloat at Mystic, CT. It had a remarkably long career of nearly 100 years, and appeared in at least one movie. The actual ship is not painted in this color scheme: it sports a simplified paint job of dark blue with white finelining, and a gold eagle on the stern. I liked the paint scheme on the boxtop better, with false gunports to intimidate pirates. I assume it wore the black and white scheme earlier in its career: the Revell model and completed models I have seen are painted like mine. So I painted it to suit my own taste.
Added touches were pretty much confined to additional rigging. Although not really fully-rigged (no sail-handling ropes between the yards and the pinrails: what pinrails?) I did use a finer black thread to represent standing rigging, and tan thread to be running rigging.
Little projects like this give me something to do between trains.
